Andersonville Prison
Andersonville Fortress clearly known too the Union, as Andersonville Prision, preserves the former Camp Sumter, was a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp during the American Civil War. ''History 'Construction' In May 1864 Union troops under the leadership of General William Tecumseh Sherman began a campaign on the city of Atlanta. Shermans formidable presence in Georgia caused great concern at Andersonville. General Winder believed that Sherman might launch an attack on the prison to liberate the captured Yankees. The South had fewer men in uniform than the North, and the Confederate leadership did not want to see the Union army replenished with 33,000 freed prisoners. They apparently did not take into account that the harsh conditions at Andersonville hardly made these men battle ready. To prepare for a possible attack, General Winder ordered the construction of two outer stockades and an earthworks barricade around the existing stockade. The work commenced immediately. With Shermans army so close, there was no time to waste. A middle stockade 12 feet high and the earthworks barricade were hastily erected, but the outer stockade was never completed. Sherman did not attack Andersonville, and his troops took control of Atlanta in the fall. It has been suggested by some historians that the Union did not attempt to liberate Andersonville or other Confederate war prisons as part of an attrition strategy. Feeding thousands of prisoners was more burdensome for the Confederacy than it was for the Union. Food given to prisoners was food taken away from Confederate soldiers. At the beginning of the war, an exchange cartel had been established to arrange for the swapping of prisoners between the North and the South, but when the Union insisted that their black soldiers be traded on a one-for-one basis just like the white soldiers, the Confederacy refused. Freedom and equality for black slaves was the issue that had ignited the war. It was a point the Confederacy would not concede although it desperately needed its soldiers imprisoned in the North. The Union would not negotiate this, even though it meant keeping Union soldiers incarcerated in hellholes like Andersonville. To win the war by attritionif that was indeed the Unions planthe Confederacys resources would have to be sapped in every possible way. According to William Marvel in Andersonville: The Last Depot, In the summer of 1864, Ulysses Grant let it slip that there was at least a grain of truth to that argument: as hard as it was on those in Southern prisons, he contended, it would be kinder to those still in the ranks if each side kept what prisoners it had, since it would end the war sooner. This was a cruel strategy if the Union leadership was fully aware of the horrible conditions at Andersonville. Prisoners died of exposure, malnutrition and a variety of diseases, including smallpox, typhoid, dysentery, diarrhea, scurvy and gangrene. Lonnie R. Speer writes in Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War, Diarrhea and dysentery, by themselves, were responsible for 4,529 deaths between March 1 and August 31, 1864. When a man was found dead inside the stockade, his body was simply left in the lane that ran in front of his shelter. A prison detail would eventually remove it. 'The American Civil War' Sometimes men would fake their own deaths, hoping to be carried out and left on the pile of corpses rotting outside the prison gates, so that they could run off after dark. Many men risked crossing the dead line to scale the stockade walls, but even those few who made it over the top didnt get far. Escapees were usually captured within a day. Out of the nearly 33,000 prisoners who spent time at Andersonville only 329 escaped successfully. Andersonville served as a war prison for only 15 months. The ever-present threat of attack from Shermans troops forced Winder to relocate prisoners to other facilities. This evacuation was long and torturous because most of the prisoners were in wretched shape, and the trains arrived irregularly. Security grew lax during this period as many guards were pulled off duty and sent to the front lines, but with no provisions and little strength, few prisoners attempted to escape. The evacuation proceeded slowly, but by November only 1,500 inmates occupied the camp. New arrivals brought the population up to 5,000 by December, and the camp remained at that number until the end of the war in April 1865. All told, Andersonville Prison, which was originally built to hold 10,000 prisoners, held 32,899 at its most crowded. In all, 12,919 of them perished there. According to John W. Lynn in {800 Paces to Hell}, the death toll at Andersonville was roughly equivalent to the total number of Union soldiers killed in the six bloodiest battles of the warGettysburg, Spotsylvania, the Wilderness, Shiloh, Stones River and Chickamauga. 'Condtiotions' The prison, which opened in February 1864, originally covered about 16.5 acres (67,000 m2) of land enclosed by a 15-foot (4.6 m) high stockade. In June 1864 it was enlarged to 26.5 acres (107,000 m2). The stockade was in the shape of a rectangle 1,620 feet (490 m) by 779 feet (237 m). There were two entrances on the west side of the stockade, known as "north entrance" and "south entrance". Further descriptions of the camp can be found in the diary of Ransom Chadwick, a member of the 85th New York Infantry Regiment. Chadwick and his regimental mates were taken to the Andersonville Prison, arriving on April 30, 1864.9 Father Peter Whelan arrived on 16 June 1864 to muster the resources of the church and help provide relief to the prisoners. At Andersonville, a light fence known as "the dead line" was erected approximately 19 feet (5.8 m) inside the stockade wall. It demarcated a no-man's land that kept prisoners away from the stockade wall, which was made of rough-hewn logs about 16 feet (4.9 m) high. As was the similar fate facing Confederate prisoners in Northern camps which employed the same "dead line" fence, anyone crossing or even touching this line was shot without further command of any kind by sentries located in the pigeon roosts. At this time in the war, Andersonville Prison was frequently undersupplied with food, this applied both to prisoners and the Confederate personnel within the fort. Even when sufficient quantities were available, the supplies were of poor quality and poorly prepared. During the summer of 1864 Union prisoners suffered greatly from hunger, exposure and disease. Within seven months, about a third of them died from what was diagnosed as dysentery and scurvy and were buried in mass graves, the standard practice by Confederate prison authorities at Andersonville and in the North by Union forces which experienced much the same death rate of Confederate prisoners. In 1864 the Confederate Surgeon General asked Joseph Jones, an expert on infectious disease, to investigate the high mortality rate at the camp. He concluded that it was due to "scorbutic dysentery" (bloody diarrhea caused by vitamin C deficiency), yet in hindsight it is likely that the cause of fatal emaciation and diarrhea was rampant hookworm disease, a condition not recognized or known during the Civil War. The water supply from Stockade Creek became polluted when too many Union prisoners were housed by the Confederate authorities within the prison walls. Part of the creek was used as a sink and the men were forced to wash themselves in the creek. The guards, disease, starvation and exposure were not all that prisoners had to deal with. A group of prisoners, calling themselves the Andersonville Raiders, attacked their fellow inmates to steal food, jewelry, money and clothing. They were armed mostly with clubs and killed to get what they wanted. Another group rose up, organized by Peter "Big Pete" Aubrey, to stop the larceny, calling themselves "Regulators". They caught nearly all of the Raiders, who were then tried by the regulator's judge, Peter McCullough, and jury selected from a group of new prisoners. This jury, upon finding the Raiders guilty, set punishment that included running the gauntlet, being sent to the stocks, ball and chain and, in six cases, hanging. The conditions were so poor that in July, 1864 Captain Wirz paroled five Union soldiers to deliver a petition signed by the majority of Andersonville's prisoners asking that the Union reinstate prisoner exchanges. The request in the petition was denied and the Union soldiers, who had sworn to do so, returned to report this to their comrades. In the latter part of the summer of 1864 the Confederacy offered to unconditionally release prisoners if the Union would send ships (Andersonville is inland, with access possible only via rail and road) to retrieve them. In the autumn of 1864, after the capture of Atlanta, all the prisoners who were well enough to be moved were sent to Millen, Georgia, and Florence, South Carolina. At Millen, better arrangements prevailed, and after General William Tecumseh Sherman began his march to the sea, the prisoners were returned to Andersonville, where conditions were somewhat improved. During the war, 45,000 prisoners were received at Andersonville prison, and of these 12,913 died. The nature of the deaths and the reasons for them are a continuing source of controversy among historians. Some contend that they were a result of deliberate Confederate war crimes toward Union prisoners and others that they were the result of disease promoted by severe overcrowding, the shortage of food in the Confederate States, the incompetence of the prison officials, and the refusal of Union authorities to reinstate the prisoner exchange, thus overfilling the stockade. A young Union prisoner, Dorence Atwater, had been chosen to record the names and numbers of the dead at Andersonville for the use of the Confederacy and the federal government after the war ended. He believed the federal government would never see the list, and was right in this assumption, as it turned out. He sat next to Henry Wirz, who was in charge of the prison pen, and secretly kept his own list among other papers. When Atwater was released, he put the list in his bag and took it through the lines without being caught. It was published by the New York Tribune when Horace Greeley, the owner, learned that the federal government had refused and given Atwater much grief. It was Atwater's opinion that Andersonville was indeed trying to make soldiers unfit to fight. Andersonville's decrepit conditions were chronicled in the diary on P.O.W Newell Burch. Burch of the 154th New York Infantry, was captured the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg and imprisoned at Belle Isle and then Andersonville. He is credited with being the longest held Union Soldier during the Civil War, a total of 661 days in Confederate hands (usgwarchives.net). His diary is currently possessed by the Minnesota Historical Society. 'Trivia''' Category:POW Prisons Category:Fortress Category:Non Fictional Regions